I loved charities until I moved to Africa. In fact I wanted to work for a charity, any charity that would have me. By charities, I don’t mean Mrs. Miggins and her mobile library van. Although there should be some authority somewhere on God’s green earth checking what Mr. Miggins is doing in the back […]
Read More →When I was a lad, all comedy was double entendre. All of it. Every single aspect of British culture had been fed through a Carry On filter, Donald McGillised and nudge nudged with a wink wink. If you didn’t have a double entendre, as the old joke goes, you could ask someone to give you […]
Read More →In the absence of a war economy, the great military corporations of the latter half of the 20th century, turned their plants, returning manpower and considerable resources to selling a peacetime economy. “We desperately need!” was replaced with “You desperately need!” The Western economies ploughed their swords into shares. Along with the seductive, pubertal explosion of […]
Read More →The city’s sprawl is vast, 77.6 square miles of grinding poverty and violent desperation, a transit point for cocaine smuggling into the US, and the centre of a new cultural boom. This is Tegucigalpa, Honduras. With the highest murder rate in the world it is unsurprising that art is not a national priority. But if […]
Read More →“What are we going to do now?” chanted the cast of Spike Milligan’s Q series. They were prophets. People finally stopped banging on about the death of the sitcom a few years ago when it became apparent that sitcoms were less dead than had been previously supposed. Sketch shows, however, have not been in a […]
Read More →Comedy writers (i.e. people like me) tend to get a bit hot under the collar when the idea of popular comedy is mentioned. Firstly, because with very few exceptions, none of us can write one, and secondly, because as a phrase “popular comedy” is more loaded than a nine month pregnant grenade. For a lot […]
Read More →As geologists call off their plan to insert a piping hot probe through the earth’s rectal ice cap, to explore a hidden lake beneath the permafrost of Antarctica, we may never discover what, if anything lives in this pristine pool of prehistoric fresh water. This means that an as yet undiscovered species of killer krill, a […]
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